SOURCE: An introduction to The Poems of Catullus, translated by Frederic Raphael and Kenneth McLeish, David R. Godine, Publishers, 1979, pp. 9-24.

In the essay below, Raphael and McLeish provide a portrait in miniature of Catullus's life and enduring accomplishment, piecing together a likely outline of the poet's life and that of Lesbia using such sources as are available.

Tennyson called him tender; Harold Nicolson was unable to understand why. Gaius Valerius Catullus, the greatest Roman lyric poet, who was said by St Jerome to have died at the age of thirty, has always excited contradictory judgments. He is prized by some for the sincerity and deprecated by others for the crudeness of his feelings; romantics credit him with spontaneity, classics with erudition; his eroticism gives him a dubious reputation among the austere; the sentimental see in his delicacy the very instance of the sensibility which proves too fine...